By the end of the 1940s, the nervous energy and tension of
bebop was replaced with a tendency towards calm and smoothness, with the sounds of
cool jazz, which favoured long, linear melodic lines. It emerged in New York City, as a result of the mixture of the styles of predominantly white
swing jazz musicians and predominantly black bebop musicians, and it dominated jazz in the first half of the 1950s. The starting point were a series of
singles on
Capitol Records in 1949 and 1950 of a
nonet led by trumpeter
Miles Davis, collected and released first on a ten-inch and later a twelve-inch as the Birth of the Cool. Cool jazz recordings by
Chet Baker,
Dave Brubeck,
Bill Evans,
Gil Evans,
Stan Getz and the
Modern Jazz Quartet usually have a "lighter" sound which avoided the aggressive tempos and harmonic abstraction of bebop. Cool jazz later became strongly identified with the
West Coast jazz scene, but also had a particular resonance in Europe, especially Scandinavia, with emergence of such major figures as baritone saxophonist
Lars Gullin and pianist
Bengt Hallberg. The theoretical underpinnings of cool jazz were set out by the blind Chicago pianist
Lennie Tristano, and its influence stretches into such later developments as
Bossa nova, modal jazz, and even free jazz. See also the
list of cool jazz and West Coast musicians for further detail.
Hard bop, an extension of bebop (or "bop") music that incorporates influences from
rhythm and blues,
gospel music, and
blues, especially in the
saxophone and
piano playing, developed in the mid-1950s, partly in response to the vogue for
cool jazz in the early 1950s. The hard bop style coalesced in 1953 and 1954, paralleling the rise of rhythm and blues.
Miles Davis' performance of "Walkin'" the title track of his
album of the same year, at the first
Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, announced the style to the jazz world. The quintet
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, fronted by
Blakey and featuring pianist
Horace Silver and trumpeter
Clifford Brown, were leaders in the hard bop movement along with Davis. (See also
List of Hard bop musicians)
In
Brazil, a new style of music called
bossa nova evolved in the late 1950s. The
free jazz movement, coming to prominence in the late 1950s, spawned very few standards. Free jazz's unorthodox structures and performance techniques are not as amenable to transcription as other jazz styles. However, "
Lonely Woman" (1959) a blues by saxophonist
Ornette Coleman, is perhaps the closest thing to a standard in free jazz, having been recorded by dozens of notable performers.[1]
^See page 20 of the Fall 1993 issue of Letter from Evans (
http://www2.selu.edu/orgs/34skid/html/23.pdfArchived 2011-07-17 at the
Wayback Machine) where Earl Zindars says "I know that it is [100-percent Bill's] because he wrote it over at my pad where I was staying in East Harlem, 5th floor walkup, and he stayed until 3 o'clock in the morning playing these six bars over and over."
^https://www.npr.org/2010/10/08/92185496/bill-evans-on-piano-jazz 35m30s – On being asked about the issue by the interviewer (Marian McPartland), Evans said "The truth is I did [write the music]... I don't want to make a federal case out of it, the music exists, and Miles is getting the royalties"
^Desafinado at jazzstandards.com – retrieved on February 20, 2009